Vital Signs

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Vital Signs Page 6

by Tessa McWatt


  In our hotel that afternoon, as I rode Anna like Min rode his ox, I could not stop blathering about how much I loved her.

  When we returned home after two weeks, we were tanned, relaxed and intimate. I held her hand on the plane. We smiled at the memory of what had gone on between us, in the hotel room and, particularly, in the desert tent. I felt I could, once more, be forever under this woman’s spell.

  We were met at the Toronto airport by Fred, with his hair cut shorter than it had ever been before. He seemed older than eighteen, like a man who had serious business on his mind. He was about to start university in the autumn and was already determined to go to medical school. He barely looked at us when we emerged through the sliding doors from Arrivals.

  “There’s some news,” he said.

  I felt Anna’s body go rigid, as if all the ease the sun had given her had retracted, and in that instant we snapped back into atrophy.

  In a bed in Cairo, the touch of your thigh on my cock transformed it. Midas fingers, Midas lips, Midas cunt.

  Sasha had taken drugs and was in the hospital.

  At her bedside in the emergency ward, seeing my daughter unconscious and gaunt, yet still more beautiful than when we’d left her, I knew that what I’d touched in Egypt was gone. “I’m staying here for the night,” Anna said, and her voice pushed me into a back corridor of our marriage, where I would remain long after Sasha’s recovery the next day.

  Two weeks later, in the park behind the DesignAge office, the blonde hair would snag me; a cliché bait for a man whose whole life had been defined by his preference for dark hair, brown eyes, long legs. I was a man, who at the age of forty-nine, became the prisoner of a short, bosomy woman in her thirties with green eyes that made a laughingstock of emeralds.

  SIX

  I am skittish around the machines in the house—the dishwasher, the dryer, even the blender—anything that Anna focusses her attention on. My stomach clenches at the sound of an appliance, as though holding in something that is the last of all that is mine alone.

  Even so, Anna seems less intent on the whir and spin of things than she is on building piles of objects around our house. There is a pile of letters, junk mail she has refused to throw out, on the kitchen counter beside the telephone. A pile of hats has grown on the floor of our bedroom near her dresser drawers. I hadn’t considered how she might look after the operation, but clearly she has and is preparing for it.

  The recovery time in hospital after the surgery is four to six days, the first days in intensive care. The home recovery period ranges from three to six weeks, “if the surgery isn’t complicated.” Doctors like Gottlieb must say these things to cover themselves against potential fuckups. Anna is obviously planning long into this recovery period and so must I.

  A pile of novels is growing beside our bed. It’s comprised of authors I haven’t known her to read before: Jane Austen, Herman Melville, and, oddly, Jack Kerouac—as though she’s revisiting some thread of her MA studies that isn’t yet apparent to me. If I weave that thread through the things she says, will I be able to decode what is going on in her head? Still, there are other piles that seem to have no significance to the past or to how she will spend her recovery time.

  One I discovered yesterday, outside, at the back of the house where she normally has potted plants, gardening tools and bags of soil for her flower garden (which often fails in this sandy terrain). There a pile of cookware has grown: saucepans, griddles, frying pans, kettles, soup pots, a wok. I hadn’t realized we owned so many pots, and when I went to the cupboard below the kitchen counter, I saw that all that was left in it was one small stainless steel saucepan that might be sufficient to boil an egg.

  Another pile is growing in the living room next to the television. This consists of every lifestyle magazine and journal that has been brought into our home over the years as renovations, beautifying facelifts and spring cleaning were contemplated: Architectural Digest, House and Garden, Redbook, Farm Beautiful. A pile of suggestions for all that has never come true. There is a tall pile next to that one of Maclean’s, Harper’s, Glamour and Modern Dance. What for? There might be a pattern if I try to link these titles, or link the piles—magazines, pots, hats … There is yet another in the bathroom, which disturbs me most of all: a pile of items that must have been on the shelf for years, accumulated not only by Anna but also by our daughters. On the floor, near the toilet, the pile begins with a rubber contraceptive diaphragm stuffed with several individual packets of condoms to help keep its shape and firmness; three pink contraceptive pill dial dispensers rest against the dome of the diaphragm. On top of the dispensers are two pregnancy detection sticks, and on top of those are balanced two tubes of spermicide.

  I want to understand the meaning she is building out of the detritus of our lives.

  She is sitting on the porch again, in the Algonquin chair that I have thought makes her look like an old lady. She does not look old now; in fact, she looks younger today than she has in many years. It is I who am old; she has only grown old beside me, on account of me. But she has abandoned even that now and her eyes are as fresh as a teenager’s.

  I would come home late and lie, and act fatigued from work and take a shower; later in bed, I would take you to assuage my guilt, or argue with you to disable my conscience.

  The day is cloudy, the air is close and almost adhesive. There are countless blackflies and mosquitoes, but she doesn’t seem to mind, or even notice. If I stand behind her like this, for long enough, will her silhouette offer up an answer?

  “Bugs aren’t too much for you?” I ask, as I sit down in the Algonquin chair next to her. I hate these chairs. Why did we ever think they suited us and should adorn our porch? Why on earth do we have a porch? Why aren’t we on a hot hilltop looking out over a raging sea? How could a porch ever represent the life we are meant to be living?

  I swat away a deer fly.

  “Mmm?” she asks, looking over at me. She hasn’t heard or perhaps hasn’t understood. It’s not important.

  “You’ve been clearing out, I see.”

  She nods, and I’m happy I’ve remembered the right way to talk to her.

  “Things you don’t need.”

  She nods again.

  “And things you will.”

  Her third nod comes with a smile. We’ve both got the hang of this.

  Kingfishers. Birds in the oak trees in front of the house titter and spring from one branch to the next and crows land in the corn field that edges the driveway. The world before us is flapping, gliding, and my head begins to spin.

  “In the wintertime,” she says, and the one, two, three of her fingers accompanies the words. She has control of them. She stops and breathes deeply, “the sea is,” then three fingers on her other hand, “not so rocky,” more breathing, one, two, three, “nausea not dizzy,” she says. And something in this convinces me that she has heard my thoughts, knows what is going on inside me. I can never keep up with her.

  She releases another deep breath, and with it: “This sea and the Baltic are different. I straddled the Baltic. It was summer. The crests of the waves were so high they knocked me over into the tiptoeing ships across the top like tiny pinafores—”

  “Anna! Do you still love me?” I am shocked by myself. She looks over at me for a moment.

  “Of course, yes,” she says, sounding puzzled. I see the fingers in her lap fly up in succession. One. Two. Three.

  “I’m sorry,” I say. I want to take it back. I want to say instead, “What is love?” I want her to know about the tinny chiming in me that wants her to die, so that I no longer have to feel.

  “There were crows out again,” she says, and this is real. True. She places her forefinger over her lips as she gets up from the chair and stands in front of me. She crouches down and is on her knees and reaching for my feet. She grabs my running shoe at the heel and is pulling it off. My right foot is now bare, and she reaches for the other shoe. She takes my left foot in her hand an
d starts to massage it, beginning at the heel, moving up through the arch and finally to the base of my big toe.

  Her name was Christine. An ordinary name, an ordinary woman I saw at least three times a week and melted into like an extraordinary man would.

  As Anna massages my feet, I can see insects land on her neck, her arms. She doesn’t flinch or take her hands away to swat at them. I cannot move to help her, but it could be now, here, that I tell her about the three years that it carried on, that blondeness and that sheer, blunt access to the tiniest parts of myself accessible through my cock. And perhaps it will be this revelation that will burst the bubble in my wife’s brain. Disgust and love are similar, easily confused; they both burn up the heart and make you weak.

  I lean over and take Anna’s hands. I pull her towards me. She is on her knees between my legs, and I hold her shoulders and bring them tightly towards my belly. Her head rests on my chest.

  “Please don’t,” I whisper.

  “Don’t worry, please,” she whispers back.

  “Let’s go for a walk,” I say and release her shoulders.

  We both stand. I put my shoes back on. Anna heads towards the back field leading to the woods that line the river. I follow her like a man who has never known a single thing about life.

  SEVEN

  “You make a sound I’ve never heard before,” Christine said once, having grown bolder with me after the first six months of coyness—her modesty overcome only during sex.

  “What sound? When?” I adjusted my position and propped my head up on my hand.

  “You know, just in that second … at the end.” She turned to face me. We lay naked on her bed, which had a view of Rosedale Valley. She’d brought wine and set out outrageously priced snacks from a Yorkville deli on the sheets. “Do you share genes with, say, a cricket?” she said, giggling, which was infectious.

  Giggling was something we did well. That and sex. And the dreaming—the what-ifs that filled our conversations over dinner.

  “What if we woke up one day to find that there were no vegetables?”

  “We’d be very upset.”

  “Some people would like it.”

  “Those some people would be under the age of five.”

  And we would giggle.

  “What if I went in and quit tomorrow, hitchhiked to California to make it big?” Christine’s parents had been born in Sweden, but the only Scandinavian thing about her was her looks—in other ways she was born to live in California. She was a clerk in a large insurance company, but she had a dream of becoming a singer. She always sang around her apartment, and although at first I had cringed at the thought that she imagined that at thirty-five she still could be discovered, I grew to like the songs, the notes she hit, the lyrics she knew flawlessly. She’d stop what she was doing and ask me to name a song, any song. I’d think hard, trying to make it difficult for her with “So Long, Marianne” or “Like a Hurricane” or anything that came to mind that I thought she wouldn’t know or would never be able to sing. She’d pause for a moment then start, slowly, with an intro beat—I could see her counting in, two three four—and she’d sing, “Once I thought I saw you, in a crowded hazy bar …”

  Things with Christine were in my control. She liked what I did, and was intrigued by my work. I showed her my drawings, talked about the business. She let me decide everything—the song, where to eat dinner, when to turn up, when to leave—and it was probably this, this simple, acquiescent arrangement, as my abs tightened and the love handles shrank, that kept me going back, until I realized we’d formed a team of some kind. Not exactly a partnership, but a duet. At home I would watch as Anna became more and more immersed in Charlotte’s homework, Fred’s university applications, Sasha’s dance lessons.

  And then, a year and a half in, Christine said, “What if I got pregnant?”

  I was silent.

  “I’ve stopped talking the pill.”

  My panic felt orange in colour.

  “What if?” she said.

  “Why would you?”

  “It’s what women do.” Her answer was tinged with contempt.

  “What about your singing?”

  And I had become wretched now.

  “You’re never going to leave them, are you?”

  I should have ended it in that moment, but the loyal man that I believed myself to be did not want to let her down. I didn’t want her to think I wasn’t the man she had fallen for. What if I could manage both lives? I would let things ride. I would keep everyone happy, I told myself.

  “We can see about a baby,” I muttered, and poured us both more wine. The fact that I had got away with something gave me new momentum. I began to tease myself with the new what ifs. Then and there I soldered the links of my new chains.

  Charlotte had been on the debating team at her high school, already arguing at sixteen for free-market values. Her skills were most clearly employed in opposition to her parents. She was a stroppy teenager, but not a stereotype. She could turn on the charm, help about the house, and show compassion and generosity at one moment, then, wham, a door would slam, her temper flare and an argument erupt. She’d confront me on the restrictions I’d implement—no television on school nights, a curfew of eleven o’clock on the weekend—by planting herself in front of me and not moving. She was like a cowboy in a western, standing her ground, hands in her pockets as though poised over holsters. I usually held my own, insisting, for example, that attending a party in a town an hour’s drive away was out of the question, but at times I capitulated merely on account of her physical presence—the woman emerging from the child, the unfeminine woman I had not expected; the commanding, demanding woman who made everyone else, including her mother and her older brother, seem so much weaker.

  On one October afternoon, I had come home from work early, the commute from the city to Stayner easier than normal, so I decided to pick Charlotte and Sasha up from school to save them the bus ride.

  “Can I drive?” Charlotte asked me, coming around to my side of the car as I pulled up to the curb where they had been waiting for the bus. Seventeen, she had recently got her beginner’s licence.

  “Not today, get in the other side,” I said, in a cheerful enough tone.

  “Dad …” she whined and stood her ground. “Why not?”

  “Because I said so,” I snapped, sounding the gong on my parenting skills. “You haven’t done much on the highway; there’s too much traffic today,” I added, trying harder.

  “I’ve done highway,” she said, with a smirk that told me she’d driven on it with others. “All my friends in Toronto have been driving for a year. They do the Don Valley, the 401, all of it. We’re complete hicks up here, Dad.” She continued to stand at my door, waiting for me to back down.

  “Nope,” I said, and started to roll up the window. Defeated, Charlotte turned on her heels in a huff and got in the back seat, letting Sasha, for once, ride shotgun.

  “I’m moving back to Toronto,” Charlotte said, as she pulled the back door shut.

  Sasha was giddy with her day’s activities: drama class, the soccer team, and the upcoming auditions for the musical. She talked without breathing for the next ten minutes, as though this exceptional placement up front gave her a unique chance to get it all out, and as if, since the episode with the ecstasy, she was still trying to make up for disappointing us.

  “Dad!” Charlotte called out from the back seat, just as I was preparing to change lanes to turn off the highway.

  “What?” I asked, slowing down and looking in my rear-view mirror, worried that something was wrong.

  “Since when do you go to Fallucci’s?”

  A spike ran up my chest.

  “What are you talking about?” I could see Charlotte in the mirror looking down at something in her hands. My throat went tight. She looked up, caught my eye in the mirror and sat forward.

  “Matches?” she asked, all Valley-girl squawky.

  “What?” I said stupidly
, looking back at the road, changing a lane and signalling to turn right.

  “Fancy place, Fallucci’s. Rick’s parents go to Toronto once a month especially. His uncle owns it.”

  I pulled onto the two-lane highway that would take us to our sideroad. I felt sick.

  “You been there?” she said in a way that wasn’t a question. A subtle debating team tactic.

  “No.”

  “Where did these matches come from then?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know.” That tone of voice again. I looked into the rear-view mirror and caught her glare.

  “Maybe they’re Mom’s,” Sasha said, her thin legs squirming beneath the skirt she hated wearing.

  “I don’t know,” I said and sped the car up a little, then rolled down my window, hoping the wind would shush my elder daughter.

  “Mom has never been there. I told her about Rick’s parents going. She said she wanted to go too.”

  “Maybe Fred …” I said, like a pitiable fool. Fred had rarely been in our car since he’d got his licence and saved up for his own run-down Toyota.

  “Mmmmph,” Charlotte grunted, and for a moment I hoped she would let the matter drop. “Why would Fred leave them in your back seat?”

  “I don’t know, Charlotte. Just stop this inane conversation,” I said, exploding now with the aggression of guilt. “You’ve barely said hello to me, and certainly haven’t thanked me for the fact that you don’t have to sit on a hot bus that takes three times as long to get home,” I was ranting. “And not a word about your day. What’s gotten into you?” I didn’t look in the rear-view as I turned right onto our concession road, but I knew that Charlotte’s face was full of loathing.

  I spent the rest of the day swallowing discomfort, wondering if Christine had dropped the matches in the back seat on purpose. I was on the verge of confessing everything to Anna that night, wanting to waylay Charlotte raising the topic, but she never said another word about it.

 

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